CES Trend #7: Mobile entertainment meets auto safety

Mobile video to your back seat, cameras for your car mirrors, gesture recognition in your dashboard...The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), set to open its doors on January 7, will offer the largest amount of floor space ever accorded to auto electronics in the long history of the Las Vegas show.

If you've ever wondered what kinds of computerized capabilities your next car is likely to give you, more than 600 exhibitors savvy on this subject -- including heavyweights such as Microsoft, General Motors, Ford, and Kenwood -- will be on hand to let you see and try things out for yourself.

But although a lot of the latest bells and whistles are geared to slicker audio and other mobile entertainment, a good many of them should also make it safer and easier to drive a car -- always a key consideration, but especially so with car crashes still happening because of careless text messaging and cellular handset calling while rambling down the road.

Most of these features should become real over the next few years, if they aren't already.

Just for starters, if vendors get their way, even cars with lower-end pricetags will begin offering richer sound experience, through audio entertainment niceties ranging from SurroundSound to just emerging HD (high definition) audio.

Meanwhile, at some point soon, your kids should be able to watch TV on display terminals and wireless headsets in the back seat -- with the content either stored on the auto's hard drive system, broadcast out by a commercial TV service, or piped in wirelessly from your home network or some other remote source.

And here's a hint about what direction mobile video is taking right now. At CES 2008, car stereo system maker Kenwood plans to give the world's first public demo of a working prototype of an emerging mobile broadcast service called MPH (Mobile Pedestrian Handheld) In-Band Mobile DTV (Digital TV).

Also in the near future, you should be able to keep an eye on the kids from the front seat with the use of special in car cameras from manufacturers such as Magna Donnelly -- while maybe training additional cameras to the vehicle's "blind spots" on the road.

From pre-CES 2008 show industry buzz -- along with a look at other CES and auto shows of the recent past -- we forsees innovations in car electronics across at least five areas; GPS multifunctional devices, voice recognition, audio, video, and safety. Most of these seem virtually definite to meet the light of the day in Las Vegas next week, in some shape or another.

Multifunctional GPS

Even as far back as CES 2006, vendors such as Magellan were adding MP3 playback and photo viewing capabilitities to the voice-guided directions and map views of in-car GPS units. A company named Xact brought Sirius satellite radio reception into the mix, too.

The next year, in a keynote speech at CES 2007, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates rolled out Sync, a Ford-developed system that uses Bluetooth wireless to communicate with cellular devices and a USB port for connectivity to input devices such as iPods and MP3 players.

Also with Sync technology, once a Bluetooth phone is connected, users can download software to the car, thereby enabling voice command capabilities.

Conversations can be hands free, because the user's voice is picked up by a microphone hidden behind the vehicle's rearview mirror. Sync turned up last summer as a standard feature in 2008 Lincoln models and a $395 option in a couple of handfuls of 2008 Ford model vehicles.

Now, at CES 2008 next week, Ford will announce its intentions to become the first US auto maker to include Sirius Travel Link -- a system that uses satellite radio to provide info on real time traffic conditions, sports scores, and every changing fuel prices -- within its onboard GPS systems. Travel Link will be included in new Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models in 2008.

Voice Recognition

Also at CES 2008, a number of other vendors should be on hand to challenge Sync with additional voice-recognition systems, intended to improve on previous technology with larger vocabularies, more personable machine voices, and other competitive differentiators.

US Telematics, for example, will be demoing an upcoming new edition of Vivee, a voice-enhanced e-mail and SMS texting product that works with Microsoft Windows Mobile for Pocket PC Wireless. Vivee already provides an animated talking avatar that reads incoming e-mails aloud.

But through a new voice recognition feature announced at the end of November, drivers will soon be able to send e-mails and text messages with spoken commands. Essentially, after listening to the user's spoken response to incoming messages, Vivee software will translate these responses into text in a choice of SMS text or POP e-mail formats.

According to Howard Leventhal, US Telematics' CEO, the revamped Vivee will offer much more flexibility than Sync. So far, Sync can only respond by SMS texting -- as opposed to e-mail -- and with only a short list of canned responses. Moreover, Vivee is portable among car models, whereas Sync is only available in Ford vehicles.

In the future, US Telematics expects to upgrade Vivee further with GPS-enabled location-based services, such as spoken announcements about restaurants available in the area where the car is currently located.

Gesture Recognition

Other vendors are expected to demo gesture recognition as an alternative method of communicating with GPS systems and other onboard devices.

At last year's CES, for instance, a concept car designed by storage vendor Seagate exploited gesture recognition as a method of controlling a multifunctional GPS system connected to a 60 GB Seagate hard drive, for holding in-vehicle video and audio entertainment libraries.

Instead of fumbling around with CD jewel boxes or the USB port for your MP3 player to put on a new song, you could select from audio content already stored on your hard drive simply by waving your hand in front of the LCD display in a few pre-defined ways.

At the time, Seagate also talked up the prospects of providing RAID arrays in the back of the car, for even more copious storage of video and audio files for use on the road.

Next: Mobile video and richer in-car audio